While our visit to the Blue Mountains two weeks ago was eerie enough on its own, it appears to be more dimensions to the creepiness. Although not mentioned in the blog post, my girlfriend mentioned in the comment section that we got food poisoning. And we certainly did, we actually ended up having to go the hospital in middle of the night after we got home. Well, apparently we were not the only ones:

Ten die as gastro hits nursing home 
(Sydney Morning Herald).

It turns out a gastroenteritis outbreak hit the same weekend, leaving a significantly higher than normal number of elderly passing away in a Blue Mountains nursing home. And giving the title of my original write-up (The Blue Mountains: How to survive the mountain towns) a morbid twist..

Now the opposition is blaming the nursing home and accuse the government of covering up the incident, because they sent out the press release late on a friday (seriously, such is Australian politics). What’s interesting is that if we caught it outside the nursing home (we never visited any nursing homes, except for the general home for the elderly that is the mountain towns themselves), that probably means the source was not there - and could help shed light on both the original source and possibly help clear the nursing home. This is also a really good demonstration of the value of a tool like the disease map project mentioned last week.

However, after seeing it in the media we informed the NSW Food Authority that we also got it, so if it’s useful for them to know, it gets to the right people.

In a piece of research released twelve years ago and seemingly immediately forgotten, Lawrence R. Zeitlin at City University of New York wrote a report on how to estimate the severity of culture shock. By using measurements of common cultural values taken from a business study of over 160.000 employees in 53 different countries, he extracted a value representing the cultural distance between two countries. This value again, can be used to measure the amount of culture shock that should be expected when cultures meet.

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The US soldier magazine Stars and Stripes reports on the problems some american soldiers have with going home to the States after being posted in Europe. Apparently, after adjusting to European life, some soldiers are so accustomed to the slower European lifestyle that they find the competitive and money-oriented life back home both confusing and less rewarding than what they experienced while being stationed out:

It was seriously overwhelming,” said the Dayton, Ohio, native, who has been stationed in Europe for eight of the past 13 years and now works at RAF Upwood in England. “I forgot how to use the phone in the States. I forgot how the gas pumps worked. I couldn’t even rent a car in Dallas because I didn’t have a credit card because you pay cash for most everything in Germany.”

Jones had been jolted by culture shock when he first moved overseas in 1999. When he returned to the States after a few years abroad, he felt similarly disoriented. It was culture shock, in reverse.

I’ll suggest that reverse culture shock is worse than normal culture shock: the latter is almost a normal part of getting into a new culture, and has the advantage that there is always the normality of home to compare with. In the reverse culture shock, however, the normality has turned out to be non-existent, and there is nowhere to return to if it doesn’t work. 

Except, of course, just somewhere else, or back to the new home, as some of the soldiers in the original article found out. 

The blog Vagabondish has a list of advice on how one traveller dealt with her shock of coming home, Christian at nomad4ever has some other musings on returning home. However, although the initial culture shock may be equal for both travelers and ex-pats who lives abroad for an extended period of time (like soldiers), the problem of reverse culture shock is probably bigger for the latter group. When establishing a normal, routined day-to-day life in a foreign culture, a lot of new habits will form, that will be confusing and frustrated on return to the home culture. Someone traveling and exploring will most likely not form any new everyday habits, since every day is new anyways. 

Has anyone else had experience with reverse culture shock?

While western countries usually have effective and comprehensive systems for monitoring infectious diseases, the countries most at risk often also lack the systems for quality reporting. HealthMap is a Google-founded research project that tries to counter this by using publicly available online information from non-official sources, such as news outlets, discussion forums and blogs, to give early warnings on disease outbreaks. The system is discussed in a recent paper from the open access journal PLoS Medicine and is already running available free of charge to the public, and is already used by 20.000 individuals monthly. 

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Longyearbyen, Svalbard: is it really the Chamonix of the Arctic? One thing is for sure, the main Norwegian settlement in the Svalbard archipelago attracts attention and excitement far beyond what should normally be at the command of an 2500 person mining outpost in the middle of nowhere. We went there 4 months ago (mid-february) to visit the Polarjazz festival and ended up falling in love with the whole place - funnily enough, since Longyearbyen thoroughly breaks every single rule for what a good place to live should have. Sunny days? There’s hardly any days at all half the year!
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While this is low on the science and psychology, hopefully the pictures may bring forth some warm and fuzzy feelings to replace those deep thoughts. The intention of this was to give a presentation of Sydney’s famous Manly surf beach, but it turned into a meditation over thongs (Aussie  language for flip-flops), seagulls in the sunset and heavy photoshopping. Bear with me.

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This sunday The Rocks Aroma Festival played out in Sydney’s old historic quarter. For anyone not familiar with Sydney, this is not as niche as it may sound. Rather it is the local code name for the annual Coffee and Chocolate fest, a seven hour hedonistic splurgaton of chocolate fountains, chocolate covered strawberries, rocky roads, honey-dipped popcorn, creamy pavlovas, hot chocolate shots, roasted nuts, chocolate cakes, cupcakes and, my favourite, the honey energy drink - to mention some of the treats (that we actually tried..).

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